Is it so much to ask for games to be perfect?

02/03/2010

I've found, along with many others, that Mass Effect 2 is a very different experience from the first Mass Effect. I've also found it to be much more glitchy and buggy than the first one. I can't say for sure how much of the graphical issues are just with my computer, but I've encountered quite a few cutscene and level geometry errors that I'm sure have to be more universal. I hope to document those more thoroughly at a later date.

For now, here are two screenshots of level decoration issues that I couldn't help but notice along the way.

Here you can see my faithful Krogan standing atop a smattering of rocks which are floating in mid-air. Further up the hill, you can see another smattering of rocks that are actually rotated to match the geometry. (This can be found during the "N7: Wrecked Merchant Freighter" quest on the planet Neith, found in the Amun system of the Eagle Nebula. It's on one of the hillsides to the right of your starting position.)

Here, we have a box that can be targeted like an interactive object for no reason. No text shows up for it, and you have to be at the correct angle for this to happen. There's nothing outside behind that box for the game to latch on to, and there's nothing behind it later in the level. (This can be found during the "N7: Hanhe-Kedar Facility" quest
on the planet Capek, found in the Haskins system of the Titan Nebula. It's just inside the entrance to the facility on your left.)

01/28/2010

Remember when Borderlands was going to be beautiful? When it was detailed and polished and looked like a slick Fallout 3 + Rage mashup? (Not to mention when each character actually had a story and a reason for being on Pandora, such as Lilith looking for one of the other 6 Sirens in existence to learn more about her own powers?) Sadly, those days are long gone, with Gearbox's original design thrown away in a last-minute gamble to differentiate themselves. I was actually really excited when I heard about the change and saw the early promo screens for the new look; I'm a sucker for cel shading, what can I say? But as I played through the game, it was clear that a lot of things were rushed and the game wasn't ready to be shipped. Never have I played a AAA game with so many blurred and mismatched textures, buggy menus, world geometry errors, and such a pervading sense of half-completed, slipshod work. Even the story and ending were completely botched and haphazard.

And so, as I played through with my friends, we began to long for the days of "the real Borderlands:" the one we'd seen movies and screenshots for, the one that seemed to have a real plot, the one with such love and care put into the graphics... The game we'd thought we were buying.

We carried on, the game enjoyable despite some of its efforts to the contrary, until we reached New Haven. That's where we saw it... Like an ancient monolith, it called out to us as we entered, and we were reinvigorated as we gazed upon it. Suddenly the game was fun again; suddenly, we had a purpose.

We had found an ancient remnant; a piece of Original Tech. Behold!

This object single-handedly revived our interest in the game. Suddenly, there were hidden treasures to be found all across Pandora, glimpses of the Game-That-Was.

12/10/2009

I've recently decided to start mapping for the Source engine, and I thought it could be beneficial for everyone if I started chronicling my progress. This is my first real attempt at mapping in over 6 years, and even the one map I have released to my credit (DM-Zkorch for Unreal Tournament, receiving Insite's 3rd lowest score!) wasn't really "good," and all the really cool stuff (details, sweet skybox, trap...) was added by my good friend Christian. So essentially, I was starting from scratch here.

I decided to start with something very basic to get my feet wet in the editor: A deathmatch level, based as exactly as possible on a map called DM-Permanent][ made by Frostblood for Unreal Tournament. Using an existing level saved me from trying to come up with my own layout, which I think was a great decision for my first level: just like a good workout, it's important to focus on individual "muscle groups" in mapmaking when you're learning. There's no reason to have to come up with your own layout and figure out a map's flow when you're not sure you can build a room yet. The original DM-Permanent was made as an entry in a three-day speed mapping contest that Christian ran on some forums a long time back, and so I figured that if it only took Frostblood 3 days to make, then maybe I'd have a chance at finishing it. It's also been one of my favorite UT DM maps for a long time and has always stuck in my head, so I figured I might as well start with something good that I really enjoyed. I'm proud to say that all the work you see in here (though I grant it may not seem like much) was done in about 4.5 days, which I think is a pretty good start; for the first day and a half, I didn't even know how to make a cylinder! [I thought you had to make a block and then start cutting, and you just had to figure out the angles if you wanted something other than an octagon... Thankfully I figured that out after finding a beginner's tutorial; I wondered why nobody was complaining about how terrible the tools were!]

Part of the challenge in making this map was the translation from UT to HL2, primarily because of the way the characters move and the sizes of their bodies. In UT, the characters are shorter and can jump quite high; they also move faster and don't really take falling damage. In HL2, the characters are shaped more like real people: much taller and skinnier and more fragile when falling, with a very small jump height compared to the character. [Your character is 73 units tall, and jumping only gives you another 20 in height. I don't know what it is in UT, but I think those numbers are much closer to being even.] Since I did this whole map by eyeballing UT with a laptop sitting beside me, translating that kind of cramped yet wide Tournament feel into a different engine that was made for a different playstyle was pretty interesting.

I started with the main room and the 2 side walkways, trying to figure out what a good feel for the space was. Once I had that established, I added the back tunnel that connects the two walkways and added the ramp in the middle. It was in making the doorways for the tunnel by using the carve tool for the first time that I understood the first rule of making maps in the Source engine: Thou Shalt Not Carve. (God kills a kitten every time you do.) I made my two doorways, and then I wanted to shift something over for some reason. I moved my tunnel a bit to the left and carved again to clear out the new overlap in my doorway, and Hammer gave me a 2D plane that was left over from the inside edge of the old wall. Confused, I tried again, and the little slip of wall remained. I have no idea if it was still solid or not, but I resorted to cutting off that whole edge and resizing the wall. And so, on my first day of mapping, after using the carve tool 4 times, I swore it off forever. Learning!

By the middle of day 3, I had all the rooms done except for the hallway across the front, and the open front area that leads into the two ramps on the right-hand side. I'd just finished the room on the left with the skylight that's connected to the main room via the doorway and the little passageway up top, and I realized that the map was just too tall. There was a war between the perfectionist in me, who wanted it done right and knew I couldn't settle for anything less, and the lazy part of me, who just wanted to keep going and get over it. "After all, it is just my first map." As always, the perfectionist won out, and even though I was dreading it, I dropped the ceiling in the main room, lowered the walkways (which involved lowering the back tunnel and the area overlooking the skylight room as well), and got everything stitched back together. Although it doesn't sound like much work (and really, it was a lot easier and quicker than I thought it would be), it was kind of a breakthrough moment for me. It was like my first "real" challenge as a mapper, and I chose to do the right thing and rework my level for the good of the gameplay. It turned out so much better because of that, and I'm glad that I got that experience under me from such a small project.

At the end of day 4 I had all the geometry in that you can see in the version that's at the bottom of this post, and the time since then has been taken up with researching how to do a 3D skybox properly and getting its lighting set up and that kind of thing.

One of the main reasons I decided to start blogging my progress here is so that this current version can see the light of day and I can show it off a little. Everything "clicked" last night in terms of location and setting and things I wanted to do, and so I wanted to get this posted as a baseline and as my "pure" version. (There's only a couple variations from the UT base: the rounded wall section on the hallway side and the shape of the skylight in the skylight room, the height of the cutouts in there, the cutouts in the front area, the walkway leading off of the square in the main room, and the raised platform in front of the window next to the upper pillar. The first 3 were because they looked/felt better, and the second two were for movement: the walkway was already as low as it could be before I had to lower the main room, so it had to stay that height to let people walk under it; the platform was added because there was originally a lip at the bottom, just like the UT version, but the player COULD NOT walk over it. I still have no idea why, but it got a decorative platform instead of being flush with the ground. Also, not all the windows, inside or out, are in place, but that's more of an incomplete thing rather than a deviation. Speaking of windows, the one by the right-hand walkway looking in front of the ramps is the biggest tell that the vertical dimensions are different between UT and HL2. Check it out. [I just realized in making this photo that I forget that section of wall that goes across the top. Crap.])

The future direction of this map started with a simple consideration: Where is it located in the world? The first Permanent was in space and had a classic spaceship/space station System Shock 2 feel to it (which I LOVE), and Permanent][ was located underwater and had a very moldy, grimy, dingy look to it. Both were great, but I didn't want to just rip off one of those themes; I wanted to do something original, and I knew I wanted a 3D skybox. At first I thought, "Okay, space, underwater... Where else would be a cool environment to put it in where people can't survive unprotected? What about inside lava?" I immediately rejected that idea because it was stupid. (Not that it can't be done: AS-Asthenosphere for UT was a really great map, which can be downloaded here, that really sold the concept of a research vessel submerged inside a current of magma; I'm just saying that I think it would be a hard sell in the HL2 universe, especially for this map.) I came to the idea of placing it on top of a mountain where you could look down and see the snow-capped ground around the building, and then the long, sheer dropoff below going down into the fog. That's where I started going with the skybox last night, although I didn't have time to figure out how to make a mountainside after I got the floor centered and figured out what I was doing.

So while I was thinking last night about how to make that work, it occurred to me that the easier and much better-looking solution would be to put it at the base of some mountains: this would allow me to keep the snowy, outside feel that I wanted, would look much more impressive as you were running by the windows (rather than running to the one good window and looking down), and it would add a LOT more visual interest to the massive skylight in that room if you could see foggy mountain peaks going into the sky rather than just a bland sky texture. (No offense, sky artist.) That setting reminded me of an interior idea that I'd had earlier on: Kind of a warm, inviting, classy hotel + ski resort with a burgundy and cream color scheme. This would let me put in some chandeliers, some really nice furniture for Gravity Gun throwing, and would give me a lot of nice detail options. (Part of the problem with working in something like Hammer for HL2DM, and really any map-making software for the past 6 years, is that you're limited in the believable spaces you can create by the types of objects you have to work with. If you're going to make a good-looking map with a high level of detail and you don't want to create and texture your own objects, then you have to find some way to use what you have to work with.) I'd like to discuss some of my ideas for the future of the map more, but I think I'll save those for another post.

Since my work on the level from here on out will probably involve me altering the geometry and making it feel and play more like a standard HL2DM level, I wanted to post this version for posterity. I'm very proud of how closely I was able to mimic the layout, geometry, and feel of the UT map I used as a base, and I wanted you guys to be able to see it before it changed into something else. I hope you'll pardon the atrocious skybox and the complete lack of optimization... Someday when I'm bored, perhaps I'll throw in some weapons, player spawns, textures and some objects and see how it plays as-is, just out of curiosity. (I wish there were bots!)

Linked here are Frostblood's DM-Permanent][ for UT and my current build, dm_permanent_r1. I'd love for you to play them side-by-side if possible, but I realize that's kind of an unusual setup. If you need either game, both Unreal Tournament and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch are practically free on Steam. (I still play Unreal Tournament today, so I promise you it's well worth the Hamilton.)

11/12/2009

I've returned. I promise no rigorous schedule, but I've been getting some encouragement to start back up, so I figure I'll post as ideas come up.

Today's post regards last week's excellent announcement from Epic about their Unreal Development Kit, which has surpassed 50,000 downloads in its first week of release and already has updates on the way. Whether this release was in reaction to Unity releasing their cross-platform game engine (formerly $199 per license) for free to indie developers or if that's just a matter of coincidence, the end result is that there are now 2 well-known game engines available to you so that you can do whatever your heart desires! (Rock, Paper, Shotgun raised a really interesting question: Instead of larger-scale mods, will we now be seeing more indie games released? I highly recommend the article. My guess would be that both will find their places; the major Total Conversions will move to being indie releases so they're not bound to the owners of a certain game, and the mods will shift back toward expansions/extensions of the parent's gameplay or story.)

My initial thought when I read about the UDK was that it was basically like giving everyone free licenses. Obviously that's not exactly true; the main differences between this and a license are 1) no tech support from Epic, and 2) no diddling the engine source code. However, it IS the latest possible version of UE3, so all the Lightmass technology and everything else that hasn't come out in a commercial product yet is in here. To quote one of Epic's employees from the BeyondUnreal announcement, "Man, one thing I hope you guys realize is that this is almost EXACTLY the engine build that we're using here at Epic! You get every single feature that we've been using here that aren't even in any games yet! We only got some of these features last week!"

The Lightmass technology really is beautiful. Included with the UDK is a trimmed-down version of UT3 featuring several levels overhauled with the new technology. I had to fire it up and make the comparison for myself, so following are screenshots from the 2 different DM levels. Feel free to click for the full-res versions, but be warned: they are huge.

One thing to note here is the dynamic shadows cast on the gun from the wires that you can see between the towers in the previous screenshot. I'm sure it's not the id Tech 4 level of unified lighting and shadows, but it's still a really nice touch.

I did notice this static, character-shaped shadow that you get now. It's in no way linked to your character geometry; when you move, that refrigerator box shadow just slides around. I assume this is a problem introduced with Lightmass, or at least the way they implemented it here.

As far as launching your indie studio with this awesome free tech, here's how the pricing works: If you want to sell a game that you make with the UDK, you're all free and clear up until your first $5,000. After that, 25% of your revenue goes to Epic. Seems harsh, but still a lot better than whatever millions they're asking for a license these days. Here's their useful summary of their technology tithe demands: http://www.udk.com/licensing.html

I also really enjoyed reading the development walkthrough of how Psyonix Studios made Whizzle, a very small and beautifully-done 2D game made in a month from scratch by 1 artist and 1 programmer. Reading the walkthrough and then seeing how it came to life by watching their promo movie/developer diary was very cool.

The first full-length mod project to be released thanks to the UDK is Prometheus. It's a single-player time manipulation game where you use copies of yourself in different times to work your way through the levels. "Braid" meets "Portal" would be the easiest way to paint it in broad strokes, though it's more like the Flash game Chronotron than Braid. The project was created and spearheaded by Rachel "Angel_Mapper" Cordone, who has been one of my favorite Unreal community luminaries since I played through her Aeryopolis level in Spatial Fear. I played Prometheus back when it was version 2.1, and I highly recommend it. (Versions 3 and 4 are the same thing, except 4 is the UDK release and 3 is the mod version for UT3.)

If you want to get started using the UDK to make your own games, Unreal rock star Hourences has released several tutorials for the new technologies, as well as a massive walkthrough of how to get the file paths and assets set up correctly for your new project.

Hourences' mod project The Ball also got a UDK release, although it's more of a string of puzzles than a real part of the series. The Ball did, however, get its final mod release yesterday, but that's still not the end of the story! The real end to the game will come in the standalone commercial release next year, along with revamped gameplay, levels, and cutscenes (so pretty much everything). Prometheus is also becoming a commercial product next year, so the professional indie/modding community looks like it's off to a healthy start!

09/08/2009

I was in a pretty exciting car crash that I don't remember on Sunday, and I got to walk out of the hospital later that night after bring Life Flighted from the accident. Doubtless, a blog will follow when I've got enough good pictures.

Seat belts work, don't do drugs, stay in school, and don't make unprotected left turns.

09/07/2009

Something I would love to do, if I were ever to become a businessman, would be to open up a bookstore that served alcohol and let you smoke outside. Think Barnes & Noble with a wine selection and beers on tap, or more accurately, a combination of the Agora (it's an awesome place; don't let the website fool you) and Taft Street Coffee, two of my favorite Houston hangouts.

I'm sure someone has done this already, or at least I hope they have. I can't imagine a place I'd enjoy more; the relaxed, peaceful atmosphere of a coffee shop inside combined with the ability to sip on a beer outside and smoke a pipe while reading one of your favorite books seems like the perfect combination. (Naturally coffee and everything else would still be served as well; I'm a firm believer in the power and glory of Coffee. Besides, you have to be able to give the minors something!)

You get bonus points if you build it in Texas and install the two complete and separate air conditioning systems they require for you to be able to smoke inside, because (A) that's pretty cool and (B) you'll need to be able to smoke inside for most of the year if you want to relax in Texas.

09/06/2009

Near the end of my Junior year, my friends and I stole a wall. This wall was made as a sample wall for the gigantic new dormitory the school was building so that the Powers That Be could see how all the colors would look together and sign off on it. Once the construction of Massive Dormitory started, the sample wall (known hereafter as "Wall") was leaned up against the nearest available building, which happened to include the campus police office. In fact, if you were looking out of the windows in the police office, you could see right in front of Wall, because the part of the building it was against jutted out past the police office.

Wall had been there for months, and I know that something must be done with it. Who would let a perfectly good wall go to waste? So one night, Justin (always my faithful partner in crime and shenanigans) and I decide we're going to move it. (We wanted to put it in front of someone's door, but everyone we wanted to prank lived on a second floor and we just couldn't get Wall anywhere other than ground level.) We called together some friends and struck at 3 in the morning.

"Hey, you've reached the voicemail of Rick Coleman. In case you've never called a cellular telephone before, I got this robot chick to tell you what to do regarding the beep."

"Please record your message after the tone. If you'd like to page this person, press 5 now. When you have finished recording, you may hang up or press 1 for more options."

"Hey bro. Um... Look, there's no easy way to say this; Danielle and I are running off together. We've been seeing each other for the last couple months and we've just really hit it off. As soon as she gets here, we're driving out of state and doing the Justice of the Peace thing. I'll let you know where we end up living once you cool off some.